Christie Signs Bill Overhauling Job Guarantees for Teachers

It will be harder for public-school teachers in New Jersey to get tenure and easier to fire bad ones under legislation signed on Monday by Gov. Chris Christie that overhauls the state’s century-old tenure law.

The new law suggests how much the landscape has changed on revising education, and on tenure, long among the most contentious issues for teachers’ unions and legislators.

A bipartisan coalition in the Democratic-controlled Legislature proposed the bill, which was passed unanimously in June. In signing the measure, Mr. Christie, a Republican, credited the leadership of the state’s teachers’ unions, which had spent heavily on television advertisements against him after he took office and forced changes to their pensions and benefits.

Under the old law, tenure had been all but guaranteed for teachers after three years on the job. The new law requires teachers to work for four years, one of which must be under a mentor, and to earn ratings of “effective” or “highly effective” in at least two years.

Teachers who fail to earn high ratings for two consecutive years will automatically face revocation of tenure, unless they have shown some improvement.

The previous law allowed school districts to dismiss teachers for “inefficiency,” but the procedure for doing so took several years and could cost districts more than $100,000, which state officials said discouraged attempts to remove bad teachers. Only 20 teachers have been fired for inefficiency in the last 10 years, state officials said.

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Under the new law, teachers will have 105 days after a school district files tenure revocation orders to fight it, and the arbitration costs will be capped at $7,500, to be paid by the state.

Signing the bill at a school in Middlesex Borough, the governor called it “a great day for good teachers.”

“Good teachers will do very well under this system,” he said.

Mr. Christie had made changing the system a centerpiece of his agenda this year. But he did not get everything he wanted. In particular, he argued to change the system of “last in, first out,” which requires districts to lay off teachers by seniority, not merit. The governor had threatened not to sign the bill unless it changed that provision. But the unions had made their support conditional on keeping it.

Some superintendents in the state’s big-city school districts, particularly Cami Anderson, who was brought in by the Christie administration to try to turn around Newark’s schools, have argued that without ending seniority rights, they cannot afford other meaningful changes.

Ms. Anderson has said that Newark spends $8.5 million a year to maintain about 100 teachers in an “excess teacher pool” of teachers who are deemed not qualified to teach but have been hard to fire.

A version of this article appears in print on August 7, 2012, on Page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Christie Signs Bill Overhauling Job Guarantees for Teachers. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe